Saturday, August 25, 2012

Here's your fresh weekly offering of Breakfast Links – our favorite links of the week via Twitter, including links to other blogs, web sites, photos, and articles you won't want to miss
• Testing the personalities of Henry VIII's six wives: are you a good little woman or a drama queen?
• Gallery of the style of Alfred Hitchcock.
• A look at the secret pool in the palatial Woolworth building, NYC.
• Revolutionary War Private Simeon Lyman skips church because it's too hot to wear pantsin August, 1776.
• Eye-witness account of a sea serpent spotted off Portland, Maine, August 21, 1818.
• Back to school! Original pack of 1903 Crayola Crayons.
• "Are you afraid of the baffling mysteries of sex relationship?" The Truth at Last - from a 1926 ad.
• Four hundred years have passed since the hanging of the Pendle Witches, 1612.
• Collection of wonderful 19th c photos of America.
• Top Ten Chanel-isms: Coco's wise & wry words to mark her birthday this week.
• "If the land lubbers have been pumping your hold, I am off..." A romantic epistle from an 18th c sailor.
• Evocative photos of decaying 19th c Gilded Age mansion Wyndcliffe.
• The discovery of salad - Massonio, 1627.
• Myth or truth? Is it really tradition that each Scottish clan has its own unique tartan?
• A brief, accurate (and adult!) history of 19th c vibrators and female hysteria.
• Much worse than having a cat walk across the computer keyboard: inky cat paws in 17th c book.
• The tacky pink flamingo lawn ornament we all love to hate, first designed in 1957.
• The science of the wet-dog shake.
• Dorothy Parker, wisecracking wordsmith and wit, born this week in 1893.
• Pictures of real life for children, 1819.
• Louis XVI's birth and unhappy childhood at Versailles.
• "Or I shall be ruined." Wellington explains what will happen if he does not get a raise, August, 1812.
• Sure cure for nostalgia for the past: 19th c coroner's reports.
• Divorce colonies in Gilded Age America.
• French food in the mid-18th c., as seen (and likely eaten) by Tobias Smollett.
• It's fair time! An 1827 New England fair & the place of women, then and now.
• The Loch Ness Monster isn't real (probably) but we can still celebrate the legend.Crave more than a once-a-week update? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh tweets every day!

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A Polite Explanation

There’s a big difference in how we use history. But we’re equally nuts about it. To us, the everyday details of life in the past are things to talk about, ponder, make fun of -- much in the way normal people talk about their favorite reality show.

We talk about who’s wearing what and who’s sleeping with whom. We try to sort out rumor or myth from fact. We thought there must be at least three other people out there who think history’s fascinating and fun, too. This blog is for them.